Starting from the Now

 Many people have lately been critiquing the mindfulness movement as being a sometimes glib and shallow "version" of Buddhist teaching that does not encompass the whole of Buddhism. I don't really agree because I think that any interpretation of what something should be is bound to alienate some parts of one's experience. I generally tend to subscribe to the idea that mindfulness is the beginning of something, in the sense that everything begins with mind. But knowing that mindfulness itself does not cover all aspects of Buddhist philosophy and practice does not bother me as much as it does others. I think it's because I don't devalue "beginnings"; they are expressions of what is always here, and always changing into something else. Why valorize the "after" and why stay only in the "beginning"? Both beginning and after are moments in the totality.
   Mindfulness is a commitment to be now with all the messiness of one's lived experiences. It doesn't mean that I am mastering an all-seeing, all knowing wisdom, but it means that whatever I am doing I am starting from the ground of experience, which is this moment. Even when there are all these turbulent feelings in me (tiredness, exhaustion, irritation), I am honoring these as parts of my being and not trying to silo them off, but nor am I making them into a fixed identity. Again, this is how experience can flow without the interruptions of conceptual absolutes.

Keith BrownWeek 2 Poststructural Research Sharing

Week 2 Sharing: Three Research Paradigms by Keith Brown

on a smooth flat-top plane

white silk porcelain edges

lifting me when I kneel

covering the spaces I cannot shield

you were called kuan shi yin

this is how I came to know you

so many years ago

lifting my open palms to heaven

while my body crosses down.

morning came so soon, and I’m in a different world

crossing times zones, suddenly I saw you in Jin Shan---

 distant friend

the rules of knowing began to shift that day; I sift

the conversational evidence to know where we begin

and where we end

past the limitless horizon where the silver light bends

evening in 2016, I stroll down a familiar Toronto street

our ends do meet; this time, reflected in store glass

dark panes in the viole(n)t x-rays trapped in a gaze

and I wonder who sits behind the screen; who among us

is trapped in the lens—

I guess it all depends.

a white car flashing through neon haze.

 ***

    For this week’s Week 2 discussion, I have chosen to reflect on three photos I have taken over the past few years related to a figure in Buddhist philosophy and religion known as Avalokiteśvara. Avalokiteśvara (kuan shi yin in Chinese) is a prominent figure in a Taiwan-based Chan Buddhist practitioner group of which I have been a participant and volunteer in Toronto since 2006. She/he is considered by many Buddhist practitioners to be a saintly being who embodies universal compassion and the relief of suffering for all beings. While this figure has been identified as a male in many Indian scriptures, s/he has been more often considered female in Chinese sources. The figure has more recently been depicted as having androgynous features, embodying both male and female elements (Yu, 2007). I chose to focus on this image because it has become a part of my learning practices in a religious setting, and thus an integral part of my theological narratives. As such, it informs my research on the ways teachers can orient to various spiritual traditions while practicing as educators.

    The three photos I present in this personal reflection, taken at different times and different locii, represent forms of representation which I have experienced as paralleling epistemologies we have been discussing at the beginning of the Poststructural Research course. I believe that the paradigm shifts in research we have been discussing are also reflective of personal shifts in the way I frame my devotional narratives.

Photo 1: A Positivist Reflection

    The photo on the right is a simple statue which reflects the purity of the Bodhisattva’s vows. People who are visiting Dharma Drum Mountain Toronto chapter will typically bow, which represents devotion to the central aspects of Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara. This image has many symbolic elements, including the many arms which symbolize the infinite outreach of help that she provides to those in need. while evoking the element of stillness that allows a person to cultivate mental and emotional calm. Harrison et al. (1987) suggest that devotional practices are not related to the person of Avalokiteśvara, per se, but rather the universal qualities of compassion and wisdom that a devotee strives to embody.

This photo (and the way I took it) reminds me of the Positivist research paradigm, because its power lies in the centrality of the figure, taken out from situated contexts which define its place and time. 

    Looking at this picture, I experience that there is hardly any sense of where the figure is situated, other than the bare table top; absent is any visible sense of a situated observer, and the figure stands relatively isolated from other figures. Geometrical proportion suggests that this figure could have only one design. The sense of even balance and proportion is also noted in many depictions of Avalokiteśvara (Fisher, 1993 p. 82). The many tiny arms gracing the sides this figure also suggest something that has an all-encompassing reach, which could be universally applicable across many contexts. The lens of Positivist research tends to foreground and isolate a single “object” of research by removing any variables that might interfere with its contemplation, including evidence of human interpretation, contingency or perspectival variations. In fact, this centrality provides a comforting standpoint of universality by offering the illusion of a single position that must always face the figure. The way the photo is taken invites the viewer to forget the photographer and their unique stance and values.

The geometrical intricacy of this statue is also reminiscent of the scientific precision of measurement and isolated variables, which suggests a symmetrical way of looking at the world. When I was first practicing Buddhist meditation and devotional chanting, I took the approach that there is only “one” Buddhism, and the devotional images it embodies are the same, regardless of culture or place. This view certainly allowed me to develop a strong faith and vision, but it limited my capacity to see my own situated place as a practitioner, as well as differences in the way people approach spiritual practices even within the group of which I am a part.

Figure 2: An Interpretive Reflection

    I first attended and participated in the Chung-Hwa International Conference on Buddhism in Taipei in 2012 to deliver a paper on a meditative group practice in Toronto. While visiting Taiwan and talking to the volunteers in the main headquarters, my thinking about Buddhist iconography and devotional practices did gradually change. I was exposed to practitioners from many countries. There, I also started to realize that as a Western practitioner with little experience in Sanskrit or traditional Chinese language, my exposure to Buddhist texts and devotion was very limited. In this way, it dawned on me that there are multiple Buddhisms, and that the way people experience devotional practice is shaped by how they arrive to the practice itself. This “how one arrives” and how the image in turn is “brought forth” is noted by Sara Ahmed in her work on Queer Phenomenology (2006, p.39) problematizes the view that there is only one idealized position, using the metaphor of the table to show how diverse arrival narratives are often present but obscured from the central object. Not only are the images themselves subject to unique cultural interpretation and understanding, but one’s own stance and entry point starts to become foregrounded.

The figure on the left is the image of “Welcoming Avalokiteśvara” who symbolically greets visitors to the Dharma Drum Mountain Heaquarters in Taiwan. Contrary to being an object in a point of stillness, this figure literally stands on a path of entrance to a larger series of buildings, thus forming a transitional object to yet another series of temples and learning centers which are not visible in the photo. Furthermore, unlike the first Avalokiteśvara figure which is positioned to face the viewer head on as she or he enters the temple, this figure is positioned in a way that is slightly tilted askance, evoking movement and circumvention rather than a forward-facing devotion. This perspectival shift, for me, parallels the aims of interpretive research, where narratives circle between researcher and participant (Paterson & Higgs, 2005). Rather than posing as an object that needs to be discovered through a silent attentiveness to forms, this Avalokiteśvara embodies the fellowship of researcher and participants.

    I took this image in 2012 when I took a tour of the headquarters, as part of my visit. I chose this image to represent a shift toward a more interpretivist way of looking at devotional practice, because the figure has a sense of place in my internal geography. It exists in a nexus of social relationships which I developed with fellow students in Taiwan, and which continues to this day in my role editing English texts for Buddhist online publications. The figure is also situated among a non-sentient and sentient environment which provides a storied text which is not limited to one position. Even the trees in the background disappear into a horizon that indicates a limit where there are unknowns. Just as qualitative, interpretive research aims to understand experience in the midst of it rather than focus on isolating a single form for scrutiny, so this image also evokes a sense of devotion as part of a larger context of inhabiting a situated world and its complex, intertwined relationships.

Figure 3: A Poststructural Reflection

   The last image in this series represents what I perceive as a poststructural view of 

spirituality. If you look closely, you will see it is a reflection in a floral shop window in the downtown GTA of Avalokiteśvara among flowers. Cars and other street scenes reflect in the window:

Of all three pictures, this is perhaps the most complicated in the way Avalokiteśvara is positioned as well as my own position as the photographer. Unlike in the first figure which is isolated and takes a central position in the photo, the figure of Avalokiteśvara here is one of many elements reflected in a window, which in turn projects images of other objects passing by. The reflective aspect of the window calls into question the “objective” or object-like nature of the photo’s numerous subjects, suggesting the textual and multilayered nature of the phenomena themselves. It also provides a multitude of entry points and narratives. This plurality furthermore calls into question the centrality of any one category such as “the spiritual” or “economic”. This picture is perhaps most reflective of what Jane Flax has referred to as Poststructuralism’s disrespect for authority (Flax, 1990, as cited in Fawcett, 2008,p.8), even though in principle, Buddhist scriptures do describe Avalokiteśvara as adopting endless “transformation bodies” to extend to all sentient beings.

   This picture, for me, also complicates the viewer stance by calling into question her or his gaze. The role of the devoted admirer is replaced with that of a voyeur—a casual and perhaps unintended passerby who is separated from the object by a series of images in glass, all of which reflect a multitude of narrative stances while blurring a sort of traditional, authoritative stance of devotion or submission. Here, I am also reminded of Deborah Britzman’s expression from this week’s readings in Patti Lather’s article, about how texts “gesture to the readers about their own guilty readings” (Britzman, 1991, as cited in Lather, 1992, p.94). The mirror reflection reminds me not only of my precarious place as the photographer but also interrogates the act of taking the picture by questioning whether the gaze is omnipotently “devoted”, and whether the object is even situated in a setting where devotions are possible. The uncertain function that Avalokiteśvara serves in a store window (whether as display, for sale, as a reflection of the store owner’s beliefs, etc.) perplexes and thwarts any clear or easy direction as to how to behave toward it, or whether to ethically “condone” or “condemn” its presence in this context. Meanwhile the image of Avalokiteśvara is compromised by counter-narratives of commodity, technology and movement, none of which were ever (perhaps) intended to be parts of the still devotional space.

   The bricolage of intended and unintended images questions the sacred aspect of devotional images, by starkly revealing them to be one of many potentially saleable objects on a marketplace driven by powerful interests. Yet, as bleak as that may all sound, the compromised place of devotion allows for several intriguing entry points to ponder: do these narratives I have weaved around Western modernity and Eastern spiritualities contradict each other, or are they allowed to co-exist in spite of their seeming contradictions? Who gets to arbitrate what constitutes a devotional image or a spiritual practice or which spaces it is meant to inhabit? What identities inhabit these juxtapositions, and where do they find their inspiration to live in the hybrid spaces of worship and the marketplace, school, and so on? Of all three pictures, this third perhaps offers the most entry points to problematize the object and reveal the viewer’s gaze as both influential and precarious.

   While composing the narrative for this assignment, I have been noticing that what is starkly absent in these commentaries is my identity as a white Caucasian male in a predominantly non-white, Taiwanese-based cultural community, as well what kinds of social privilege I bring to this community. Could my move in presenting this reading of Buddhist texts/images in an academic setting also be perpetuating oppressive dynamics in the wider culture, as well as constitute cultural misappropriation? How can I re-present these narratives in ways that most respect the communities from which I am drawing insights? Knowing that these questions are absent from all three narratives leaves room to trouble my construction of the three narratives: to consider why it’s absent, who benefits from the absence, and how the absence challenges me to go deeper into whether I have engaged this topic from a poststructural or even emancipatory lens. It continues to be the work I need to do in this course, and going forward into my doctoral research.

References

Ahmed, S. (2003). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. London: Duke University Press.

Britzman, D. (1991, March). Beyond Innocent Readings: Educational Ethnography as Representation. Paper presented at the University of Cincinnati Research Symposium.

Fawcett, B. (2008) "Poststructuralism." The Sage Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods. SAGE Publications. 15 Dec. 2010. <http://www.sage-ereference.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/research/Article_n334.html>.

Flax, J. (1990). Thinking fragments, psychoanalysis, feminism and postmodernism in the contemporary West . Berkeley: University of Callifornia Press.

Fisher, R. E. (1993). Buddhist Art and Architecture. New York: Thames & Hudson

Harrison, P.; Hartmann, J. & Matsuda, K. (2002). Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra. In Jens Braarvig, ed. Manuscripts of the Schoyen Collection, III: Buddhist Manuscripts Vol. 2. Oslo: Hermes Publishing, pp.179-214.

Lather, Patti. (1992). Critical Frames in Educational Research: Feminist and Post-Structural Perspectives. Theory into Practice, 31 (2), Qualitative Issues in Educational Research (Spring, 1992), pp. 87-99.

Paterson, M., & Higgs, J. (2005). Using Hermeneutics as a Qualitative Research Approach in Professional Practice. The Qualitative Report, 10(2), 339-357. Retrieved from https://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol10/iss2/9

Yu, C. (2007). Kuan-yin and Chinese Culture. In Proceedings of the Fifth Chung-Hwa International Conference of Buddhism (eds. Magee & Huang). New York: Chan Meditation Centre